ANGER-PART I [M, 3-16-26]

 CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Angry Old Man—ANGER-PART I [M, 3-16-26]

 

Old friend and colleague, Bob Parsons, became a school bus driver when he retired from being a preacher. He tells of another driver who lost his cool because of unruly students and slammed on his brakes. They had to call EMTs to attend to the injuries of some of the kids.

This brings up two issues: 1] Why don’t school buses have seat belts? 2] How should we deal with anger?

I have no answers for the first, and probably none for the second, but I’m going to write about anger anyway. In fact, I’m going to write about it at such length and in such a disorganized way that it’s going to take two columns. Reader beware…

Besides, this is Lent, a season that is dedicated to self-discipline and self-sacrifice, to remind us of the sacrifice of Christ. So, a good time to talk about anger. [An even better time would be when Jesus turned over the tables of the money changers in the temple, but I have other plans for that story…]

We can understand that bus driver. We’re all going to get mad sometimes, especially at children, who can be so uncooperative, because, after all, they are kids, and that’s how they get some control. Anger is a way to get control, for anyone. It sounds strange, but we get control by getting out of control.

Anger is real. We usually blame someone else, or some event, for it. “She made me mad.” Sometimes it just boils up. We don’t know where it comes from. We get mad way out of proportion to some little slight. I’ve heard people say that they had beaten someone else down into the ground “because he looked at me funny.”

 

I suspect that anger, especially that kind of anger, is part of original sin. It’s just there, anger about life. St. Augustine said that “the so-called innocence of children is more a matter of weakness of limb than purity of heart.” Anyone who has ever cared for a child understands what he was saying. Kids get mad just because they get frustrated.

Herman Melville has Ishmael speak of this original sin/non-rational root of anger in Moby Dick when he says “…especially when my hypos get such an upper hand on me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

Anger means we have reached the limits of our ability to cope.

Ishmael, of course, is a “root” name. The original Ishmael was Abraham’s eldest son, though born of Hagar, the maid of Abraham’s wife, Sarah. Isaac, though, the biological son of Sarah, is claimed to be the true heir of Abraham, and thus of Jews and Christians, with his first-born half-brother left out. That’s enough to make anyone angry, so Melville’s Ishmael in some ways represents the non-rational side of human nature, the half-breed side, the angry side that just wants to knock people’s hats off for no reason. He is the original sin/anger part of Jung’s “collective unconscious.”

Also anger is probably a derivative of the biological imperative to stay alive, a way of getting up enough energy to fight for existence.

Bernie Siegel says that those who have the best chance to survive cancer are the automatic fighters, those whose first thought at any challenge is to fight back.

Anger at the cancer is part of the fight. It’s certainly understandable if someone gets angry with the insurance company that denies them treatment for the cancer, too.

Anger, though, at the doctors, at your spouse, at your children, at the neighbors, at your pastor, because you have cancer, is misplaced. It happens, though, because they are there and available, like the four-year-old tantrum is at the parents or the dog because there’s nobody else in the house.

But anger is also a choice, sometimes a largely unconscious choice, but it’s not the only possible reaction to any person or occasion.

My sister-in-law Millie was a great junior high special needs teacher. When she had to discipline a student, she would say, “Your punishment will be this because you decided to do that.” The kid would always protest. “I didn’t decide to do it.” “Yes,” Millie would say, “you did.”

Probably the best thing any of us can learn about anger: Regardless of how emotional we are, anger is always a decision. We have a choice. That is freedom.

John Robert McFarland

More next column.

Please pray for Judith Unger, who is having surgery today.